red hawk
by hpark7310
Summary: the formation of taka was a spur of the moment thing, one of sasuke's many whims. but it's all she has left, and she's not letting go. (basically a snapshot of events and decisions after the war/focused around karin and taka mainly/may or may not be updated, depends on how i feel)
1. Chapter 1

**so i have a lot of feelings about taka and tbh the series handled them badly after a certain point. its been a while since i watched/read naruto so pls let me know how this went! thanks for checking it out**

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She's exhausted, not just because of the fight and the powerful red lie that spilled out of the moon, but also because the years of struggle have finally, _finally_ caught up to her and it doesn't so much weigh her down as it does make her feel kind of weightless. Like gravity blinked out all of a sudden and she's drifting away.

So, she finds a little spot for herself under a tree somewhere and she drifts, not really asleep, but not really awake. Aware enough to feel the slight breeze on her face, but not aware enough to sense the presences coming closer until two bodies come settling down next to her. She makes room for them. They're solid. They're warm. They drift together.

When she wakes up, there's a sour taste in her mouth and the sky is a milky purple color, streaked with pale orange clouds. There's a little bit of hair tickling the corner of her mouth, but she doesn't bother moving and just sits there, staring at the sky, until it's streaked with rosy pinks and pastel blues and her eyes are burning.

The days after that pass by in a haze that blurs around the edges, but eventually regain their focus, their clarity. Her teammates are there the entire time, becoming more distinct with the passage of every foggy moment until –

"Juugo," she asks one day, words scratching at her dry throat until she's forced to cough. She takes a sip out of Suigetsu's bottle, which would normally lead into him throwing a bitch fit, and then an argument, but today only garners the slightest twitch. "What do you think will happen to us?"

Juugo's mouth thins into a pale line, like a strip of moonlight in his face. He releases the bird he's been holding in his hand (the first they've seen since before the war) and glances back, catching her eyes before turning forward to squint into the blinding blue sky. "I hear Sasuke is to be pardoned for his crimes."

She nods. She'd only heard snippets of the story from the times they'd shambled into an Alliance camp to get food, but it's evident that whatever happened, he'd been instrumental in it. There's the flash of a memory, pink hair surrounded by a halo of afternoon sun and the warm line of tears sliding down her cheeks and into her hairline. That girl must have pushed for it too. Her and whoever else that had made the mistake of loving someone with eyes that cold. The scar on her chest tingles and she scratches it absentmindedly, swallowing down the sudden weight in her throat until it sits, more comfortably, somewhere in between her ribs and her navel.

It's time to stop drifting, she decides. And she says so out loud, each word spilling quiet and heavy out of her lips, tumbling down into the grass and dirt until it disappears. Juugo doesn't say anything but he gets to his feet with the air of an old man, gray as a faded photograph. It's a long time before anyone else moves.

Her throat is dry again. She goes for the bottle to her right, but it's snatched away by Suigetsu, who looks like he wants nothing more than to close his eyes forever but stands up anyways. He tips the bottle back and squeezes, but it's empty. She smiles.

Finding their old leader isn't hard. She doesn't have the energy to look for him, but she doesn't have to, because the whispers lead them right to the circle of tents that he's supposed to be in, and then she still doesn't have to look for him, because his presence is so solid and heavy that she can march right up there without thinking about it. There's nobody standing guard outside.

Before she can think why, the opening flap swings out and someone steps outside. It's that girl again, and her eyes are still bright with tears, but also with something else. Something that is soft and warm and far more painful than any scar. But she steps to the side, holding the entrance open, and they – Taka, their little amalgamation of splintered teeth and metal – exchange a look. They walk in together.

They're not sure what they were expecting. They knew that Sasuke wasn't alone, there was another presence in there, just as strong, and they'd guessed who it was, but seeing those two laying side by side, each missing an arm… It's a lot. They almost leave, but Sasuke cracks an eye open and something in it has changed, because in it is a look that none of them recognize.

She walks over until she's standing by his head, in between him and the kid with yellow hair. They don't say anything for a long time, but when they do, it's her and the words seem to float right out of her. "Juugo says you're being pardoned," she says first, followed by, "What will happen to us?"

Sasuke closes his eyes and works his jaw for a little bit. "Can't make any promises, but I can push for you three to get a pardon too," he says, and she can't help but blank out for a beat too long because that's another thing that's changed, his words are quiet and they're filled with something that she can't place, but it gives her the same feeling that his eyes did and that's worse than anything she could have prepared herself for.

They say a couple things more after that, and some time in their mumbled, weightless conversation, he struggles to a sitting position, tiredly waving off Juugo's help until he's there in their silence, staring down at his single hand with those unrecognizable eyes.

She reaches out, hesitantly, to brush the bandaged stump where his arm used to be and offers, even more hesitantly, to see if there's anything she can do about it. To something that could be either relief or disappointment, he declines.

And then his eyes travel up her hand, to her arm to the junction between her shoulder and her chest, and then further still into the place where he knows there's a star shaped scar there, surrounded by spiderweb cracks and pink, sunrise-colored skin.

And all of a sudden, like gravity has come crashing back and the air has left her lungs, she knows that _that look_ is. So she takes another breath and clears her throat and pulls her outstretched hand back until it's a fist, pressing into the cot at her waist level until it hurts. And she thinks about teeth and raspberry red eyes surrounded by lines that came too young glazed over and empty and snakes in a room that's humid and cold all at once.

She nods, and finds that her teeth are clenched together so tight that she's a little surprised they don't break, and there's so many things that she wants to say but chokes down so she can burst out of that tent and out of that camp and all the way back to the tree she slept and ate under for the past week until the air comes back and something that burns white hot like the flash of thunder bursts from her chest and into her throat and out until it sinks into the grass and dirt under her feet.

She stays like that for a long time, and by the time she looks up again, her head is pounding and her neck is sore, and the sky is milky purple again, but this time it deepens into a black that's infinite, illuminated with the silver of stars an eternity away and moonlight that's not quite full.

They're right behind her, sitting on the grass, staring up at the same sky, and there's a space right between them where she can settle in until they're pressed together so firmly it's almost like they're one being. And something in her chest lifts until it's floating, past the moon and all the stars. A little hawk floating into infinity.

Suigetsu wanted to find his village's swords more than anything. Juugo wanted peace and the assurance that he would never hurt anyone ever again.

She can find anything, she can give Suigetsu what he wants. She looks down at her hands, limp and pale in her lap and remembers fear and desperation and a hundred other things, and she remembers chains, and knows she can give Juugo what he wants too. She says so out loud.

They tell her that she doesn't have to, and she cracks a smile that stings her cracked lips. She's done letting people make her do things she doesn't have to, she decides.

She decides, "I'm doing this because I can."

She decides, "I'm doing because I want to."

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 **thanks for reading! leave this little gremlin a sexy review**


	2. Chapter 2

**a little continuation piece. hit me while i was doing m*th.**

 **let me know what you think!**

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Slowly but surely, they get back on their feet.

Suigetsu drinks so much water it's almost like he's trying to guzzle down half the ocean, replacing murky old pools with something clean and crisp like mountain springs. Juugo spends hours patching up birds with broken feathers, not really saying anything, but easing back into his old skin.

And she… she's learning how to walk again too. Finding new ways to define _Karin Uzumaki_. Once, she'd thought it would be like putting on her glasses after a long sleep, fuzzy one moment and crystalline the next. She finds it's more like the mornings when all she can do is sit, slouched like the bones have left her body, blinking sleep out of her eyes until colors sharpen into something distinct.

Around them, the Alliance begins to pack up and go home. The camp that they usually go to for food and gossip is being dismantled at a breakneck speed, the Iwa and Kiri nin that comprised most of it being so eager to return to their villages and resume their lives there. So she takes what supplies she can, not stealing them for once as the rations are being handed off more or less freely in a show of shell-shocked goodwill.

"How long do you think it'll last?" Suigetsu asks one day, forming the words around the straw hanging from his teeth, and the words are flat and semi-curious, devoid of the amused scorn that would usually color the words. It's different, but not necessarily bad, per se.

Juugo shrugs in response.

Actually, she thinks that this peace is different from the tense treaties made in the aftermath of past wars. The Alliance had been created to combat a single, almost cartoonishly evil enemy. And they'd won, but not without sacrifices. Bonds formed in suffering are strong. There's very few that know this better than Taka. Or what's left of it, she thinks, but doesn't say. Partly because she doesn't have to, partly because the thought of giving voice to everything that's been sitting in her – it's a lot at once.

Maybe one day it will be said. Someday, wrapped in the sleepy haze of The Future, where scars have faded to moonlight-pale white and old wounds have stopped festering and maybe, hopefully, begun to heal. It's a thought that could make her smile. So she does.

There's a bigger camp a little under 3 miles away, bigger than the Iwa-Kiri one they've been staying at. This one's manned almost entirely by Suna nin, and they're taking longer to take down their campsite. So that's where their little group of three go to next.

They make it there sometime in the late afternoon, when their shadows haven't lengthened yet but are surrounded in a halo that's gold and almost luminous. It brings out the softer parts of each of their faces, she decides. Juugo's kind eyes and Suigetsu's perpetually half-smiling mouth.

The camp seems to give under their mass, giving them space and then enveloping them the same way water does when you first ease yourself into it. One of the leaving ninja lets them take over their tent with hardly a passing glance, just giving them a brisk rundown of how long they have to stay – two weeks – and where the food is served.

There's only two cots, so they push them together and sleep like that, bunched up skin to skin, breathing softly on each other's arms and necks. When she wakes up, there's an ugly red imprint going diagonally from her spine to her hip and pressed into her elbow. The next night, she forces Suigetsu to sleep in the middle again, and when they wake up, there's not a mark on him, although he bitches and moans for over an hour about how uncomfortable it was.

Juugo rolls his eyes, half annoyed and half amused, because Suigetsu was asleep before any of them. The next couple days pass by like that, and once again, Taka has found a rhythm to slide back into, as easy as a fish slides back into water.

The next little break in their routine comes with the arrival of an unmistakable presence. Normally it takes a little effort for her to memorize a person's chakra signature, but this one, much like the pink haired girl and her sunny companion and even Sasuke, who will haunt her until her last heartbeat, has an aura that's so big and solid, and almost suffocating in power that it's like the breath has been violently sucked out of her throat and she's huddled behind a ledge, looking for a man with stolen eyes and blood on his hands.

It's that Kazekage, the one with red hair and love emblazoned proudly on his forehead. They meet eyes and he walks up to her – to them, and they can't help but stand a little straighter, a little stiller. Prey in the eyes of a predator, ready to fight to the last tooth and nail. But the Kazekage stops just short of them and just says, "You've been pardoned."

For a second, she can't register what he said, but the memory of a choked conversation in a tent that smells like disinfectant and chakra so strong it's almost like trying to breathe underwater comes so strong it's like a phantom arm, choking her again.

"That's good to hear," Juugo says, looking the Kazekage dead in his desert-sky eyes. Behind him, Suigetsu nods, sipping from his little straw with a smile that only looks half-forced.

The Kazekage stands there, looking a little bit like he's trying to get a read on them, before nodding once and walking away. They release a collectively held breath after that.

"I'm hungry," Suigetsu declares.

"It's not a mealtime yet," she points out, but she's already cracking the slightest smile because she can anticipate his frustratingly smug response.

Like always, he delivers, slinging an arm around her and Juugo both. "I have an idea."

Like always, it's a bad idea. They do it anyway.

The next time they see the Kazekage, the trees are dripping with golden light again and he's sitting alone one of the long benches in the dining area. His gourd is leaning on the bench to his left and he's staring into middle distance with one hand resting lightly on its curved surface. It doesn't take a sensor to tell that he's tired. He looks younger than he's ever looked, she realizes with a pang of something that might be pity, because no matter what she claims otherwise, she's not some pitiless monster and she can feel sorry for this kid with blood and the burden of an entire village on his hands.

Before she can decide against it, she walks over and sits heavily across from him. He looks up, locking eyes with her almost immediately.

"You don't have eyebrows," she notices.

He nods, still tired, but his lips are doing a thing where they could be turning up or down.

"Did Sasuke ask for the pardon?" she asks.

The Kazekage nods. "They weren't sure whether to vote against it or not, but he said that you never would have done those things if he hadn't asked you to," he says to her, although the words are also directed to Suigetsu and Juugo, who have settled in to her right and her left. She takes a moment to let Suigetsu maneuver his stupid sword off his back so it's leaning on the table.

"Did you vote against it?" she asks next.

He shakes his head. "Naruto believes in Sasuke," he explains, and it's a mixed bag of emotions for the two of them. She realizes that the Kazekage might have more in common with Taka than he thinks, but she doesn't say it out loud.

Instead, she says, "Who voted against it?"

"No-one," the Kazekage replies. "After Sasuke explained things," he says with a shrug, trailing off with an unreadable look in his eyes. "Do you have anywhere to go after this?" he asks.

Suigetsu gives her a look. She turns and sees Juugo giving her the same bland _go ahead_.

"We're looking for the swords," she says. The Kazekage's eyes flicker to the one in front of him and his face shifts, before settling back into the unreadable one from before. "If you need a place to rest, Sunagakure will open it's gates for you," he offers.

She swallows something that's heavy in her throat. She almost says he doesn't have to, but remembers.

He doesn't have to, but he can. And she doesn't have to, but she can accept. "Rest sounds good," she admits. It's a small sentence in a small voice, but it's deafening, surrounded by the silent agreement of her team, her friends, her _family_.

The Kazekage closes his eyes for a brief eternity and nods. There's a tired smile that gives away to a tired young face. She notices there's not a line in it. Just those grotesquely dark bags and love emblazoned on his pale skin, dripping gold.

"Thanks," she mumbles, suddenly feeling a little self-conscious, and gets up to leave. She doesn't look back. She can feel their presences right behind her.

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 **thanks for reading yall. leave a review**


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